Instructional Design Templates
Templates streamline instructional design work, and make you more efficient. The longer you work in the field, the more templates you create, and the faster future projects go.
Here are the assets I rely on regularly when developing digital learning experiences:
Needs analysis and kickoff documents
Project plan Gantt chart
Storyline and PowerPoint files
Intro and outro videos for courses
Rise shell to host an entire course
Camtasia tutorial template
Image and icon library
Using templates has many benefits: consistency across learning experiences, rapid development, and clear processes. You save yourself time if you don’t need to go in and adjust the settings on every Storyline course!
As a corporate employee, your company will likely provide most of these. If they don’t, it’s in your best interest to create each template and save them in a shared location where your whole team can access them. I’ve also created a personal version of each of these with my own “Day Learning Design” branding that I use for public appearances (view an example here), conferences, or webinars.
This is why project based payments work in favor of more experienced instructional designers, by the way. They move faster because they probably have assets waiting in the wings ready to go. Someone new to the field will have to build deliverables from scratch, and could end up getting paid more in an hourly payment model.
In a nutshell, build up your collection of instructional design templates to make your life easier.
Bonus Resource: Watch Tim Slade create a template in Storyline in this YouTube video.
